The Experience Project describes itself as the “premiere passions-based network,” a website where individuals share blog posts about their life experiences in order to connect with others who share those experiences. One of the topics at the Experience Project is “I Watch Ancient Aliens,” and it is as sad as you could imagine such a category would be. But amidst the standard internet blather, a familiar refrain keeps manifesting, one that I’ve pointed to several times in the words of the Ancient Aliens cast members themselves: a spiritual longing that the aliens serve to fill. Here we have evidence from actual audience members (self-selected though they may be) that this religious impetus is not confined just to television alien speculators looking to fill air time.

On September 6, one writer lamented that there is a global conspiracy by world leaders to suppress the galactic harmony alien contact would produce:

I can’t do a lot about those decisions but I can try and reach out and I trust my friends here on Earth feel the same. We are a united planet that has not been told the truth. I have heard the stories of contact between ET and our leaders. I have heard that our leaders kept this from us and that the aliens obliged our leader’s choices. I’ve heard that our leaders are frightened and refused to let go of nuclear technology and in turn have been ignored by the galaxy as a whole. I want to tell you that these are not our choices. We wish to know you, we wish to meet you and we wish to greet you.

But this is more properly ufology than ancient astronautics. Let’s look at a post from just today that encapsulates everything I’ve stressed about Ancient Aliens for years now:

I remember when the show first aired I'd stop on it for a minute while channel surfing. I'd dismiss the theories and try to find a more logical explanation for the things they were talking about. TRY being the key word. Then I picked up Von Daniken's book 'Chariot of the Gods.' Then I started paying more attention. Then I watched every episode of season one, two, & three back to back on Netflix. It makes so much sense! It's become an obsession. This f*cking sh*t is the closest thing to religion that a guy like me could ever ask for. it's given me new perspective on everything I encounter in my daily life.

The “closest thing to religion” he could ask for. Doesn’t that say it all? The writer, unable to explain the shows “mysteries” (many of which are fake), mistakes his own ignorance for humanity’s and turns from science to faith to fill the gaps in his own knowledge. His last sentence is chilling, and I sincerely hope he is exaggerating. It sounds, though, that what he is grasping for is a sense of the Burkean sublime, something traditionally approached through religion and later through architecture and art, including Gothic horror. I found the Burkean sublime in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos (which was Lovecraft’s intention), where the unknown and unknowable serves to create terror and awe, and I have on previous occasions noted that this experience of the sublime is the closest I have come to the “thrill” some claim to experience due to religion. The audience for Ancient Aliens seems to be looking for this thrill of the sublime in a very literal way, trying to turn the transcendent into the material. Worse, the audience seems to find a sense of community with ancient astronaut speculators—a community that it formed in opposition to the elites they feel are suppressing creativity and free expression. Consider this comment by a writer who is still upset that in high school, the writer’s science teacher gave a low grade to a paper that cited von Däniken as evidence of alien contact, taking the teacher’s lesson about credibility of sources as part of a conspiracy to suppress free thought and calling his teacher “close-minded.” The writer claims to have “fastidiously researched the subject, reading Von Däniken and other authors with similar views”—blissfully unaware that they are all copying one another, and contemptuous of actual scholarship in the field.

The most refreshing aspect of Ancient Aliens is that the show doesn't feel it's necessary to quote my 10th grade science teacher -- or anyone else who's going to dryly spout "swamp gas," "the planet venus," or "you're all either crazy or just making it up." Instead, the show presents its evidence, and then lets the viewer decide. Each episode features people I consider "old friends" -- George Noory, David Hatcher Childress, Philip Coppens, Robert Bauval, Erich Von Däniken himself, and others I have come to "know" over years of researching this subject. And the title font is reminiscent of the one used in "Battlestar Galactica!"

It’s what I’ve tried to say for years: Ancient Aliens is insidious because it conflates ideas with personality and through sheer repetition creates acceptance. These are the techniques of propaganda, and Ancient Aliens quite obviously is well-schooled in employing such methods. Just look at the second block quote above, where the writer came to accept the ancient astronaut theory because of five years of weekly exposure to the same repeated message. It reminds me of World War II when the Office of War Information required broadcasters to embed messages about recycling and income taxes into daily radio programs on a fixed schedule to balance repetition against listener exhaustion. They found once a week was just about the right amount of time to repeat a message. Obviously, people who choose to write about their love of Ancient Aliens online are a small subset of the overall audience for the show, and the overall population in general, so we can’t extrapolate broader understanding of the show’s audience from this sample. But these are real people who watch this show religiously (in both senses), and it is important evidence for how at least some viewers use and employ what Ancient Aliens teaches to create and re-create their identities and their feelings about their position in society. Anti-elitism, anti-intellectualism, paranoia, ignorance, fear, faith… these are the forces that swirl around the ancient astronaut theory. They are symptomatic of our age and keep popping up again and again, whether with ancient astronauts, pre-Columbian white visitors, creationism, Freemason conspiracies, or any number of similar claims.

It is very unsettling and say so much about how powerfully misleading Television or other medias can be.

While I have only been generally intrigued by it I really don't see the publics interest and gravitating toward divinity being that different from the spiritualist movement in the late 1800's.
A lot of the themes from that time do bleed in modern to times as you a have mentioned before. Sadly I do not know if the spiritualist movement reached a equivalently sized audience based on the mass media of the time.

It would make a great sociology research topic, Scientology and the 60's new agers seem to fall into this same group. Would be very interesting to see a study not about the movement by why people are so taken in by them.

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Shawn Flynn

9/9/2013 06:43:04 am

I'm commenting before I read this but I have a feeling that its comparable to after watching a good horror movie or reading a good horror story and having those irrational fears that a serial killer or Slenderman is lurking in the dark part just of the room your in.

Jason, have you read Rebecca Costa's book The Watchman's Rattle? She frames the question of the impact that superstition and pseudo-fact can and probably will have on our society long-term.

Essentially she says that the more difficult it is to find and understand facts, the more readily those without the specialized knowledge of those facts will adopt superstition to solve the dissonance that our modern world forces onto the under-educated.

Obviously not a new idea and certainly not original to Costa, but she words it well.

The way you framed it, this seems like a new manifestation of manufacturing consent.

One interesting aspect is that propaganda originally was a function of the Catholic church. Funny how this propaganda is starting to wear its image like religious robes.

Von Popiken
bit.ly/15Rn83c

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Varika

9/10/2013 05:27:34 am

...we might get the WORD from the Catholic church (ie, etymology is that the word came from the name of a Catholic committee), but I don't think it's fair to blame the existence of the CONCEPT on them; just what do you think the Coliseum was all about, anyway? Or any number of Greek plays? For all we know, cave paintings exist for propaganda reasons.

I'm probably not going to be terribly popular saying this, but I also think that science shows, lately, have been increasingly propagandic. Particularly with regards to climate change. There is an overwhelming emphasis on "DEATH DEATH DEATH AND DESTRUCTION UNLESS YOU CHANGE YOUR WAYS!" that is definitely designed to jump up and down on human fears. And it's not that I don't believe that climate change is happening, though given that everybody seems to have a different theory on the mechanisms I'm not particularly solid on how much impact humanity has had. But science does not require dirges and sepulchral drama and it DEFINITELY doesn't need to call a cat 2 hurricane a "superstorm." And I'm not just talking about the news media pulling this, I'm talking about shows on Discovery and on Science and on the Weather Channel. The kind of shows that purport to tell you how parts of the environment WORK, what their mechanisms are, etc.--and to the last one, they are all super-alarmist and ALL of them have some segment devoted to how human beings caused all this and it's "up to us" to find some way to make it all go back to The Way It Was.

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The Other J.

9/10/2013 10:21:05 am

Right, we get the word from the church, and propaganda as a concept isn't necessarily new -- Caesar was pretty good at it, it's in the bible, in the names some Native American tribes have for other tribes, etc. But I think there's a bit of a difference, and you actually hit on it with your point on climate change.

Church propaganda was meant to convert people to their faith -- to propagate the religion. Political propaganda is more about fear of the other or the unknown weighted against the glory of the homeland. Even the Coliseum was about putting alien others on display reduced to violent creatures or bait for other violent creatures, all in the middle of one of the greatest monuments to Roman power.

The ancient aliens hypothesis does attack established science and academia, but it seems more about converting others to its way of thinking than it is about generating fear of the unknown or other. Conversely,fear of a changing climate appeals to fear of the unknown. In that way at least, ancient aliens proselytizing strikes me at least as more in line with religious propaganda than political propaganda.

Varika

9/10/2013 05:53:28 pm

I dunno, "IF YOU DON'T DO THINGS OUR WAY YOU WILL BE ETERNALLY PUNISHED IN THE MOST PAINFUL WAY POSSIBLE!" strikes me as some pretty significant fear-mongering, so I'm not sure I see how it's any different from "If you don't do things our way, we will torture you in front of thousands of people!"

Similarly, ancient alien stuff says "You shouldn't trust The Government and Science because they are Lying To You," which clearly preys on fears of "if they're lying about this, what else are they lying about?" and "if they're hiding this, then they could do horrible, terrible things to me and hide that, too."

Propaganda invariably seems to contain elements of appealing to fear, regardless of who's doing it, quite possibly because fear is one of the easiest things to appeal to on the knee-jerk level. Fear and anger tend to blind people to logic, while other emotions tend to be less blinding, or at least are harder to whip up to that level of blinding.

I just really think that science shows using these methods does science in general a disservice; you can't even now point and say, "Look, see, real science uses numbers and logic, and anything that can't produce them isn't science, it's junk!" because the "real science" is stooping to that level, TOO.

Thane

9/9/2013 12:26:37 pm

The need to believe in something outside of yourself and human society seems to be something encoded in the majority of humans. Reject traditional religions and humans will find or invent something else to believe in whether it is gods, aliens, crystals, conspiracies, cult leaders, pure ideal reason, and so on.

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Shane Sullivan

9/9/2013 03:38:40 pm

"I've got this...this giant gaping hole inside me...and I'm always trying to fill it with something. I like to call it my 'god hole,' and I think a lot of people in this world, they...they fill it with religion. But I don't believe in god."

"But you wanna fill it with pussy?"

"Yeah."

~Dennis and Frank, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

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Paul Cargile

9/11/2013 03:07:03 am

My idea is that religiosity is an evolutionary selection, a societal trait that benefits the survivability of the group through a cohesive ideology. There is safety in numbers and religion is one way of keeping those numbers together. Schisms can cause societal disorder.

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bear47

9/9/2013 03:52:59 pm

Yes, some do treat this as religion. Religion also uses propaganda. It is all irrational belief in the "unseen" and the "other".
I still, at 66, get my sense of wonder, awe, or whatever it is just by looking up at the night sky, or, try spring time and all the new blooms all around, or the autumn leaves that turn such wonderful colors. If one retains, or tries to recapture the childhood sense of wonder all around us, I find that any religious/ancient aliens crap is totally unneeded. But then, I am just an aged heathen, so what do I know?

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Uncle Ron

9/10/2013 04:02:48 am

What you know is the truth, my friend; and understanding that it is all muons and bosons and quarks doesn't make it any less awesome. UR

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Varika

9/10/2013 05:33:47 am

I love you.

No, seriously, this is the way more people need to feel. Why does anyone need to tie this sense of awe to anything? What's wrong with just...feeling it and enjoying it?

I like to use the rainbow example. There is a logical, scientific explanation for why and how they exist, and I know it by heart. But there is also the sense of wonder at seeing one, and so many people seem to think that this sense of wonder is diminished by knowing the science behind it, and I never have understood why...it's just different ways of appreciating the same phenomenon, and they're both valuable to the human existence.

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Only Me

9/9/2013 06:44:35 pm

I'm always having religious feelings when I watch this show. It usually involves looking toward the heavens and saying,"Oh. My. God. Why?".

This is really fascinating stuff - it's amazing to see it all come out so explicitly.

"I found the Burkean sublime in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos (which was Lovecraft’s intention), where the unknown and unknowable serves to create terror and awe, and I have on previous occasions noted that this experience of the sublime is the closest I have come to the “thrill” some claim to experience due to religion."

I remember sitting in silence for about an hour after reading through 'The Colour Out of Space' in one sitting. Normally, though, I get this kind of thrill from academic work and finding out more about global history.

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The Other J.

9/10/2013 05:09:42 am

You've experienced the Burkean sublime from academic work? Wow. What work? I've read academic work that triggered existential absurdity and angst, but not the Burkean sublime. Either I've read the wrong works (quite possible), am impervious to such strong feelings (even more possible), or you're more receptive to them.

I'm familiar with it, but have only encountered it (rarely) in some art, architecture and nature. Describing the Burkean sublime in an academic work to me seems like describing color to a blind person. (Believe me, this is my failing, not your's.)

I suppose you'll have to trust me, but I read a book on the quipu - as in, the pre-Columbian Andean memory aide/means of storing information (possibly) - and it kept me up all night thinking about the possibilities it presented. Completely academic book by Gary Urton, not especially well-written, not intended to be a literary masterpiece, and not even the final word on the subject, but somehow it was absolutely fascinating and world-enhancing. And no, I wasn't on drugs.

The Other J.

9/10/2013 06:37:16 am

Ah-ha, so it was another culture's idea that the academic work was disclosing what triggered the experience. I can see that.

Actually, it was more about the way in which it worked - its formal properties, according to Urton, rather than its worth as art or 'culture' or whatever else. I guess it's like finding the sublime in mathematics. But I think there's plenty of academic work that can do the same, at least for me - lots of books, entirely academic ones, manage to stir up inside of me that level of appreciation for the universe. I suppose it isn't surprising that I react quite strongly to bad academic work as well.

I watch the show because I'm interested in the UFO phenomena and related topics. I understand the show is propaganda (from whom and why? -- that's what I want to know more about.), but the visuals are kind of neat, and Ancient Aliens reruns are still better than sitcom reruns.

Pretty much all of this show's material is recycled from Zechariah Sitchin (just like most New Age material is basically cribbed from Helena Blavatsky, when you come right down to it). But he's never mentioned, for some reason... He actually did primary research. His research may also be personal wish fulfilment, but it was real primary research.

I don't think it's actually propaganda for any purpose other than using propaganda techniques to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. The talking heads piggy-back on this so they can sell more books and get paid for more lectures--at $5,000 to $10,000 per lecture! Nice work if you can get it.

I think the reason Sitchin isn't mentioned is because Ancient Aliens is a product of Giorgio Tsoukalos and Erich von Daniken, and EVD and Zecharia Sitchin had a frosty relationship.

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jay

1/17/2014 03:07:37 pm

the idiot are the othes who think we are alone in this vast universe. each star is a solar system, our solar system has 1/8(they killed pluto) inhabitable planets, so im assuming there are 100's of trillions even more planets that are inhabitable, we are 4.6 billion years old, where would we be in technology if we havnt had those 4-5-6 mass extensions. pompeii was covered in "70 FEET" OF ASH. THATS IN MODERN TIMES. we are 2 million years old, and modern humans are 200,000 years old....if you need proof start digging about 3-5 miles deep miles deep. if we had been around 200,000 years without the extinctions, we woud be going anywhere we wanted to(einstein-rosen bridge) whake up, were it? where the only ones,? how far does ignorance go???? it not hard for the average person to believe we have space travelers since the beginning, and its not far to htink they were gods...hence indians/cortez....science nis stupid. i feel bad because "FAITH IS A GIFT" and not everyone receives it, and i feel bad for the people that haven't recieved it yet. thats science, "got to see to believe" i worry for them

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.